4 Numbers

(This section is largely taken from the Revised^4 Report on the
Algorithmic Language Scheme.)

Numerical computation has traditionally been neglected by the Lisp
community. Until Common Lisp there was no carefully thought out
strategy for organizing numerical computation, and with the exception of
the MacLisp system little effort was made to execute numerical code
efficiently. This report recognizes the excellent work of the Common
Lisp committee and accepts many of their recommendations. In some ways
this report simplifies and generalizes their proposals in a manner
consistent with the purposes of Scheme.

It is important to distinguish between the mathematical numbers, the
Scheme numbers that attempt to model them, the machine representations
used to implement the Scheme numbers, and notations used to write
numbers. This report uses the types number, complex,
real, rational, and integer to refer to both
mathematical numbers and Scheme numbers. Machine representations such
as fixed point and floating point are referred to by names such as
fixnum and flonum.